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I think Open311 both as a vision and a standard is healthy and has plenty offuture opportunities.

- it’s well known and frequently mentioned in the government space

- there’s obviously vendor interest

- the capabilities of the standard are a strong baseline for interoperability

When you ask the question of “Future of Open311” I’m curious about what you’respecifically asking for? I can’t give you business certainty, but there is alot of resources and groups active in the space.

Based on our experience, similar to what Thomas Lennartz pointed out, open311specs provided good value for read-only, "open data" type of use cases, but itneeds some updates to be more effective in a transactional, data input context.

-- It lacks enough specs for data validation, which is critical to accept datainput.-- The token based security specs was out-dated. Although there are ways tohide token via some sort of proxy with different authentication outside theAPI, it's limited. It also does not use newer features like JWT (json webtoken), and not compatible with social media identity store via oAuth etc. Foranonymous access, it lacks mechanism to guard bots using tools like recaptcha.-- The API design itself can use some more structured design beyond URIencoding of a list of attributes. It's much common to post a request body witha full nested data structure in the format of json or xml objects.-- Need of more mobile client. Not sure what happened to the early GeoReporterapp. Code still on GitHub but the app is off store.

As far as vendor interest, although many of them claim supports open311, theytypically prefer their own API for more functionality.

1. The most important one IMHO is that a public standard – as long as itdoesn’t directly belong to a certain company or organization – is not avery rewarding thing to be actively maintained. Thus many of the largerusers (i.e. cities) have indeed already defined/built extensions toOpen311 for their own local demand and communities; but could, ofcourse,do so much more efficiently without having to worry aboutcommunity discourse or potentially required compromise when facingcompatibility issues with other implementations.

2. Similar reasons may apply to commercial implementors who may notalways want their systems to be as "open" as the original standardimplies. So these are more likely to compliment the original spec withmore proprietary features.

3. What’s more, as has been said, not every local administration iseager to learn, what the general public "tell them to do" – which is whyin many cases the "Open"311 is not always friends with authorities.Which dramatically diminished the point of even "extending" the approach.

That said, at my company we are currently working on a new fullimplementation of the *current* spec for our commercial communitydashboards. And as a concept Open311 still appears to get regular boostinside the windfall from the Smart City craze — so, as of now, it’s farfrom dead.

But I’m indeed not sure as well if Open311 will have a future as ifsimply left alone.

Maybe also send a request to Philip Ashlock as one of its initiators ifhe got any future plans for the development ?

Mostly we do this using a proxy which accepts Open311 requests fromFixMyStreet and then convertsthose into whatever format the system we're communicating with uses. It'sbeen a really good way to do thisas it moves all the complexity out of the main codebase which only needs tohandle Open311.

FixMyStreet can do read-only Open311 but we've not got round to handingaccepting reports overOpen311, partly because of time, and partly lack of demand.

I'm sorry to have been so unresponsive here lately, but there are some gooddevelopments underway and I've been really encouraged to see the continuedenthusiasm and dedication from this community.

I've been spending much of the past year investing in ways to build morecapacity for efforts like these, both in my government and across otherinitiatives and institutions. I've been encouraged by efforts like the OpenData Institute's Standards guidebook (https://standards.theodi.org/) as well asmany of the projects mentioned on this list. I remain dedicated to buildingcapacity in communities like this and will report more on that soon, but Ishould also be honest that I will likely not be able to put as much time andattention into Open311 as I did when it first began. That said, I want to makesure we can build the capacity and momentum needed for the specification tokeep pace with the natural evolution of use cases and user expectations and Iwant to make sure that I don't become a bottleneck for others to feel empoweredto contribute. Let's plan to regroup and coordinate a bit more early in the newyear and see if we can update some milestones and refresh resources like theExtensions page on the wiki (http://wiki.open311.org​/GeoReport​_v2​/Extensions​/)Until then, happy holidays and happy new year!